Aired 04/11/10 Father Boyle has made a point of collecting and telling uniquely powerful stories of life and death, and his work has supplied him with more than anyone should know.He has so far buried 168 of his homies, and fills his first book TATTOOS ON THE HEART with their stories. I read it cover to cover on a plane flight Chicago to LA, and cried at least a dozen times. Boyle's compassion is boundless, his work is courageous, and his example is a profound challenge. Father GREGORY BOYLE was ordained a Jesuit priest in 1982. He received his Master of Divinity from the Weston School of Theology; and a Sacred Theology Masters degree from the Jesuit School of Theology. Since 1986, Father Gregory has been the pastor of Dolores Mission in the Boyle Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles. The church sits between two large public housing projects, Pico Gardens and Aliso Village, known for decades as the gang capital of the world. In 1988, Father Boyle began what would become Homeboy Industries, now located in downtown Los Angeles. His first book is TATTOOS ON THE HEART. http://www.homeboy-industries.org/

  Aired 08/01/09 "You don't have to choose between making money and making sense.... Green business practices are good for business and for the world. They can increase profits, lower costs, and attract customers." Those are the words of Gil Friend. Gil and I met in 1973 when I directed a video documentary of a Buckminster Fuller World Game Workshop. Each in our own ways, we've been plugging away at that game ever since. Gil Friend, President & CEO of Natural Logic Inc, is a systems ecologist and business strategist with nearly 40 years experience in communications, business, and environmental innovation. Clients include Agilent Technologies, Coca-Cola, Dean Foods, Hewlett Packard, Levi Straus & Co, Nike and Sun MicroSystems. Friend is the author of the upcoming Risk, Fiduciary Responsibility and the Laws of Nature, and just published, The Truth About Green Business. http://www.worldchanging.com/

Aired: 02/03/13

This week, my guest is DAVID GOLDHILL. After the death of his father, Goldhill, a business executive, began a personal exploration of a health-care industry that for years has delivered poor service and irregular quality at astonishingly high cost.

His September 2009 Atlantic cover story rocked the health-care world, and Goldhill has written a book expanding on the topic, Catastrophic Care: How American Health Care Killed My Father-And How We Can Fix It. It is a system, he argues, that is not worth preserving in anything like its current form. He asserts Obamacare will not fix it, and offers his own radical solution.

* As a nation, we now spend almost 18% of our GDP on health care.

* In 1966, Medicare and Medicaid made up 1% of total government spending; now that figure is 20%.

* The federal government spends
– 8 times as much on health care as it does on education
— 12 times what it spends on food aid to children and families
— 30 times what it spends on law enforcement
— 78 times what it spends on land management and conservation
— 87 times the spending on water supply
— 830 times the spending on energy conservation.

* For every two doctors in the U.S., there is now one health-insurance employee-more than 470,000 in total. In 2006, it cost almost $500 per person just to administer health insurance.

 

 

Aired 05/16/12

Crazy though it may be, I assume many have accepted the fact that the Republican party has a problem with science and ultimately with evidence facts — reality. It is now a matter of politics for them to deny science. Among their presidential primary candidates, only Jon Huntsman and Mitt Romney accept that warming is happening and humans are a contributing factor.

CHRIS MOONEY has been on this trail for years. In 2005, he wrote the best-selling
THE REPUBLICAN WAR ON SCIENCE. By the time their anti-science, anti-reality bias was established, MOONEY was asking a deeper question. Did science have anything to teach us about why? And it turns out, recently, science does. That brings us to Chris’s new book, The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science and Reality.

According to Mooney, from climate change to evolution, the rejection of mainstream science among Republicans is growing. Not only that, so is denial of expert consensus on the economy, American history, foreign policy, and much more. Why won’t Republicans accept things that most experts agree on? Why do they fight facts? He writes that the political parties reflect personality traits and psychological needs -Republicans wedded to certainty, Democrats to novelty – and this is the root of our divide over reality.

Hopefully, understanding how or why Republicans deny science and facts should suggest ways to interact and work with that “reality” differently in order to be more effective moving forward.

http://scienceprogressaction.org

republicanbrain.com

 

 

In her There are 183 million active video gamers in the US, and the average young person will spend 10,000 hours gaming by the age of 21. There are now more than five million “extreme” gamers” in the US who play an average of 45 hours a week.

According to game designer JANE McGONIGAL, this is because videogames are increasingly fulfilling genuine human needs. But she goes way beyond that, in her first book, REALITY IS BROKEN– just out in paperback – she suggests we can use the lessons of game design to fix what is wrong with the real world.
Drawing on positive psychology, cognitive science, and sociology, she shows how game designers have hit on core truths about what makes us happy so that videogames consistently provide the exhilarating rewards, stimulating challenges, and epic victories that are so often lacking in the real world.

I recommend REALITY IS BROKEN to people who have no interest in games. Separate from what it says about the current reality and possible future of games, the book is an excellent primer on what we have learned – and most people don’t know – about happiness, learning, productivity and growth.

www.janemcgonigal.com